Adult neurogenesis, a specific form of brain plasticity in mammals occurring in the subventricular zone, is subject to complex regulations. Hypocretin/orexin neurons are implicated in the regulation of sleep and arousal states among other functions. Here, we found orexin afferent projections in the rat subventricular zone, which is a neurogenic region. We therefore studied in detail the origin of the orexinergic innervation to the subventricular zone in rats. Post-mortem retrograde tracing combined with immunofluorescence procedures indicate orexinergic projections toward the subventricular zone...

Neuroinflammation is a main component of Parkinson's disease (PD) neuropathology, where unremitting reactive microglia and microglia-secreted soluble molecules such as cytokines, contribute to the neurodegenerative process as part of an aberrant immune reaction. Besides, pro-inflammatory cytokines, predominantly TNF-α, play an important neuromodulatory role in the healthy and diseased brain, being involved in neurotransmitter metabolism, synaptic scaling and brain plasticity. Recent preclinical studies have evidenced an exacerbated neuroinflammatory reaction in the striatum of parkinsonian rats that developed dyskinetic responses following L-DOPA administration...

Participation in regular exercise is important for the maintenance and improvement of brain health across the lifespan. These beneficial effects are realized almost immediately, as a single bout of exercise transiently improves cognitive function after cessation from exercise. This postexercise time period represents an opportunity to strategically prescribe cognitively stimulating activities for enhancing brain plasticity and function. Mechanistically, acute exercise is proposed to upregulate brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression and increase regional activation and arousal of brain areas involved in cognitive control; however, the specific mechanisms underlying this facilitation are poorly understood...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial electric stimulation (tES) are noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS) tools that are now widely used in neuroscientific research in humans. The fact that both TMS and tES are able to modulate brain plasticity and, in turn, affect behavior is opening up new horizons in the treatment of brain circuit and plasticity disorders. In the present chapter, we will first provide the reader with a brief background on the basic principles of NIBS, describing the electromagnetic and physical foundations of TMS and tES, as well as the current knowledge of the neurophysiologic basis of their effects on brain activity and plasticity...

Sex steroid hormones are synthesized from cholesterol and exert pleiotropic effects notably in the central nervous system. Pioneering studies from Baulieu and colleagues have suggested that steroids are also locally-synthesized in the brain. Such steroids, called neurosteroids, can rapidly modulate neuronal excitability and functions, brain plasticity, and behavior. Accumulating data obtained on a wide variety of species demonstrate that neurosteroidogenesis is an evolutionary conserved feature across fish, birds, and mammals...

Profound behavioral changes occur in the mother at parturition, a time when the maternal brain undergoes extensive remodeling of neural circuits, especially in olfactory structures. Adult neurogenesis, a form of brain plasticity, could constitute an adaptive response to motherhood. The present study hypothesized that chemical disruption of olfactory neurogenesis would impair the establishment of maternal behavior in sheep. In addition, because ewes are able to learn the olfactory signature of their offspring, we also examined whether disruption of olfactory neurogenesis altered recognition of the familiar lamb...

Sensory processing is affected in multiple neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders. Genetic and environmental factors guide the formation and fine-tuning of brain circuitry necessary to receive, organize, and respond to sensory input in order to behave in a meaningful and consistent manner. During certain developmental stages the brain is sensitive to intrinsic and external factors. For example, disturbed expression levels of certain risk genes during critical neurodevelopmental periods may lead to exaggerated brain plasticity processes within the sensory circuits, and sensory stimulation immediately after birth contributes to fine-tuning of these circuits...

Cognitive training has been suggested as a possible remediation of decline in brain structure with older age. However, it is unknown whether training effects are transient or enduring, as no studies have examined training-induced plasticity relative to decline in older adults across extended periods with multiple intervention phases. We investigated the temporal dynamics of brain plasticity across periods on and off memory training, hypothesizing that (1) a decline in white matter (WM) microstructure would be observed across the duration of the study and (2) that periods of memory training would moderate the WM microstructural decline...

Acrobatic exercise is considered a complex motor activity and may promote motor learning and neuroplasticity. The objective of this systematic review was to verify possible plastic brain changes induced by acrobatic exercise in non-lesioned rat and mouse through the analysis of experimental studies. Manual and electronic searches were conducted in MEDLINE, EMBASE and ISI Web of Science databases, without restriction to language or publication date. Synaptogenesis and neurogenesis were selected as the primary outcomes...

OBJECTIVE: Glucocorticoid receptors (GRs) have an important role in mediating the effects of glucocorticoids (GCs) on brain plasticity and mood. GC drugs and elevated cortisol level can cause psychiatric disorders including depression. The B-vitamins have numerous benefits on general health as well as mood, and cognition. The aim was evaluating the effect of vitamin B6 following dexamethasone (DEX)-induced depression in mice, to see if it can be proposed as a remedy for psychiatric problems following GC therapy...

Stroke represents a severe medical condition that causes stroke survivors to suffer from long-term and even lifelong disability. Over the past several decades, a vast majority of stroke research targets neuroprotection in the acute phase, while little work has been done to enhance stroke recovery at the later stage. Through reviewing current understanding of brain plasticity, stroke pathology, and emerging preclinical and clinical restorative approaches, this review aims to provide new insights to advance the research field for stroke recovery...

A hallmark of modern Perceptual Learning (PL) is the extent to which learning is specific to the trained stimuli. Such specificity to orientation, spatial location and even eye of training has been used as psychophysical evidence of the neural basis of learning. This argument that specificity of PL implies regionalization of brain plasticity implicitly assumes that examination of a singular locus of PL is an appropriate approach to understand learning. However, recent research shows that learning effects once thought to be specific depend on subtleties of the training paradigm and that within even a simple training procedure there are multiple aspects of the task and stimuli that are learned simultaneously...

Playing music requires a strong coupling of perception and action mediated by multimodal integration of brain regions, which can be described as network connections measured by anatomical and functional correlations between regions. However, the structural and functional connectivities within and between the auditory and sensorimotor networks after long-term musical training remain largely uninvestigated. Here, we compared the structural connectivity (SC) and resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) within and between the two networks in 29 novice healthy young adults before and after musical training (piano) with those of another 27 novice participants who were evaluated longitudinally but with no intervention...

Rehabilitation interventions represent an alternative strategy to pharmacological treatment in order to slow or reverse some functional aspects of disability in Parkinson's disease (PD). To date, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying rehabilitation-mediated improvement in PD patients are still poorly understood. Interestingly, growing evidence has highlighted a key role of the glutamate in neurogenesis and brain plasticity. The brain levels of glutamate, and of its precursor glutamine, can be detected in vivo and noninvasively as "Glx" by means of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (H-MRS)...

OBJECTIVE: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is still the most effective treatment of severe and therapy-refractory major depressive disorder. Cognitive side effects are the major disadvantage of ECT. Cognitive deficits are generally temporary in nature and may be mediated by the hippocampus. Recent studies have shown a temporary increase in hippocampal volume and a temporary decrease in cognitive functioning post-ECT compared with pre-ECT. This study investigates whether these volumetric changes are related to changes in cognitive functioning after ECT...

Objectives Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a promising tool for treatment of chronic pain. We describe the use of navigated rTMS to treat a patient affected by phantom limb pain (PLP) and to modulate brain functional connectivity. We reviewed the literature on the use of rTMS as a tool for relieving central pain by promoting brain plasticity. Methods A 69-year-old patient came to our observation blaming severe pain (Visual Analog scale, VAS, score 9) to a phantom right lower limb. We mapped left primary motor area (PMA) by navigated TMS and assessed connectivity with resting-state functional MR (rsfMR)...

Importance: Many mental disorders emerge during adolescence, which may reflect a cost of the potential for brain plasticity offered during this period. Brain dysconnectivity has been proposed as a common factor across diagnostic categories. Objective: To investigate the hypothesis that brain dysconnectivity is a transdiagnostic phenotype in adolescence with increased susceptibility and symptoms of psychiatric disease. Design, Setting, and Participants: We investigated clinical symptoms as well as cognitive function in 6487 individuals aged 8 to 21 years from November 1, 2009, to November 30, 2011, in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort and analyzed diffusion magnetic resonance imaging brain scans for 748 of the participants...

Neuromodulation, thanks to intrinsic and extrinsic brain feedback loops, seems to be the best way to exploit brain plasticity for therapeutic purposes. In the past years, there has been tremendous advances in the field of non-pharmacological modulation of brain activity. This review of different neurostimulation techniques will focus on sites and mechanisms of both transcutaneous vagus and trigeminal nerve stimulation. These methods are scientifically validated non-invasive bottom-up brain modulation techniques, easily implemented from the outer ear...